The father of Ahmed Mohamed, the Muslim American teenager from Irving, Texas, who was arrested last year after officials thought the homemade clock he brought to school was a bomb, is suing the city’s mayor and a host of media outlets for defamation, local media reported.
A lawsuit filed Monday in Dallas County Court by Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, obtained by the NBC affiliate, names as defendants Mayor Beth Van Duyne and an array of conservative media outlets and personalities, including The Blaze; Glenn Beck; the Center for Security Policy; Jim Hanson, Fox Television Stations; Ben Ferguson; and Ben Shapiro.
The 21-page suit cites incidents involving news personalities making what it contends are false or defamatory statements about the teen.
Mohamed, a robotics fan, modified a pencil case to function as a clock and brought it to school last year with hopes of impressing his teacher. School officials accused him of trying “to make a bomb,” pulled him out of class, sent him to the principal’s office, threatened him with expulsion and had him escorted out of the school in handcuffs.
Among the incidents mentioned in the lawsuit is a segment that aired on The Blaze last September featuring host Beck discussing the teen’s arrest with guests Van Duyne and Hanson, the executive vice president of the Center for Security Policy. Beck and Hanson theorized that Islamist extremists or the Mohamed family may have directed the teen to bring the clock to school as a stunt. Van Duyne, the suit adds, did not object to or correct those comments and has continued to refer to the clock as a “hoax bomb.”
The suit references similar remarks made on Fox News in 2015 by commentators Ferguson and Shapiro. It demands that all defendants retract their comments and apologize on the air.
Mohamed’s family filed another lawsuit last month against the school district, the principal of the high school and the city of Irving, alleging that his civil rights were violated.
Representatives for those named in the lawsuit did not immediately return The Huffington Post’s requests for comment.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article misidentified Ferguson and Shapiro as Fox News hosts.
